What Highet did for the Aeneid, someone ought really to have
done for the 'much more rhetorical' Thebaid long ago; Dominik
scores points straight away for having elected to make good this shortfall
in the now burgeoning critical industry
on Statius' magnificent poem. He offers us an intelligent taxonomy of the
265 speeches of the Thebaid, with a principal division into
'rhetorical' and 'non-rhetorical' speeches, subdivided into such different
types as 'prayers', 'deliberative speeches', 'taunts' and 'oracular and
prophetic speeches.' The basic classification is made by attaching the
label 'rhetorical' to those types of speeches for which specific formulae
are given in the works of rhetoricians such as Menander; the others are
not directly discussed in the rhetoricians (for the very good reason that
people rarely comissioned orators to compose 'taunts' or 'questions'), but
are recognizable as types well-established in epic poetry. The distinction
is thus, within an epic poem, rather an arbitrary one, but the author
himself accepts this (p. 2), and proceeds to use it primarily as a model
which allows exploration. The result is that he succeeds not only in
drawing out the salient characteristics of each type, and of numerous
specific
examples of each type, but also in effect ingeniously collapses his own
division by showing that, while in practice all speeches in the
Thebaid are profoundly influenced by the prescriptions of
oratorical theorists, it is also frequently the
case in speeches from both groups that distinguishing between
'rhetorical' and 'literary' motivation is impossible. In short, however
they are classified, Statius' speeches are always directed to the
advancement of the plot and the thematic concerns of the poem.

The bulk of the main text (pp. 70-204) is given up to an examination of
the speeches, class by class, and example by example. In general, the
interpretations offered by Dominik for each individual speech are sound
enough, if rarely radical. They range
from the fairly incisive to the fairly bland, but it would be too much to
demand a consistently high standard when the material covered is so
diverse. For example, the section on 'deliberative prayers' (pp. 90 ff.)
makes a real contribution to our reading of Adrastus' often misunderstood
syncretic 'Sminthiac Hymn' at the end of the first book, and there is a
bleak but well-argued interpretation of the deuotio of Menoeceus
(107 ff.) which departs strikingly from the so-far dominant readings of
Vessey and Williams. And the sections on the various speeches of
Polynices also bring out his ambiguous character very well indeed, aided
as they are by the general reflections on his role in the later chapter on
the revelation of character (pp. 217 ff.). On the down side, much of what
appears in this central section of the book is extremely repetitive, while
much too much space is in any case given over to the retelling of the plot
and the summarization of the content of individual speeches. Here an
impulse towards comprehensiveness seems to have been allowed free rein,
with damaging effect. It reaches its nadir in the treatment of
Parthenopaeus' mandata morituri at the end of Book 9 (p. 196; two
paragraphs of summary, a single sentence of comment) and of Eteocles'
reply to Tydeus in the embassy scene of Book 2 (pp. 201 f.). If you know
the poem well (and such people do exist), then you may well feel that a
good hundred pages could have been cut without any undermining at all of
the central arguments of the book.

Subsequent chapters offer some
reasonably useful, if not particularly novel, comments on the part that
speeches play in the construction of character in the Thebaid (pp.
205-235) and on the stylistic devices used to embellish them and to give
them greater expressive force (pp. 236-270). The book is then rounded off
with about ninety pages of very helpful statistical analysis which allow
one readily to identify the various general patterns (who speaks when,
what types of speech they make, the length of speech etc.) that have been
discussed in the main body of the text.

The principal critical
stance taken is one of pessimism, with the human characters of the poem
seen as little more than helpless victims of malicious supernatural
beings. This is insisted on again and again, with numberless appeals to an
interpretation of Jupiter's speeches in the council of the gods in Book 1
(esp. pp. 34 f., 72 f., 88 f., 191 ff.) that presents him as a liar and a
tyrant. The fickleness and frequent cruelty of the Thebaid's
deities have been the object of detailed and insightful comment in some
quarters in recent years, most notably in Denis Feeney's The Gods in
Epic (Oxford, 1991), where Jupiter is seen as being marked by
'violence, self-indulgence, and final indifference' (p. 371). But Dominik
pushes his case rather too far, or, worse, tends to take it as
incontrovertible when in fact many serious objections can be raised
against it: note that Feeney at least is aware that in the Thebaid
Jupiter in fact is of all the gods the one who 'remains most true to his
traditional nature', and this has serious implications for how we read
such crucial scenes. There is no room here to discuss so large a subject
in any detail, so let me simply say that Dominik has a case to make but
fails to address satisfactorily many important questions. In particular,
no sufficiently cogent distinction is made between the actions of Olympian
and chthonian powers, and Jupiter and Tisiphone are in effect treated as
if they were willing and deliberate allies in the same divine-fiendish pl
ot against humanity. In fact, the worst excesses of the war, as Dominik is
well aware, result from Dis' curse in Book 8, and do not form part of
Jupiter's plan to punish Thebes and Argos. It is therefore perverse to
treat Jupiter simply as the villain of the piece, or, for example, to
accuse him in effect of hypocrisy in expressing horror (Book 11. 118 ff.)
at the duel between Eteocles and Polynices, since that duel was ordered by
Dis (8. 70 f.) and provoked in accordance with those orders by Tisiphone
(11. 57 ff.). Nor is it fair to dismiss Vessey's psychological account of
the guilt of the seven princes in the summary manner of the footnote on
pp. 206 f., for all that Dominik is right in holding that Vessey's
analysis is excessively reliant on Stoic thought. The Tydeus who chomps
away on the mangled head of Melanippus is not just some poor working stiff
of a hero who caught the king of the gods on an off day, and surely
some account must be taken of the moral implications of such
passages as the poet's apostrophe of the fratricidal pair, in which he
rips apart the fabric of his own narrative in order to curse them to hell
in his own voice at 11. 574 ff. Last and by no means least, Dominik pretty
much ignores the role of Theseus in this poem, vouchsafing him little
more than ten lines of mind-bogglingly one-sided comment such as makes the
author of the In Pisonem look like an amateur. No convincing
consideration of the ethical issues of the Thebaid can afford to
omit a thorough discussion of the restoration of human and divine law in
the last book of the poem, and this is something scholarship is yet to
give us. Perhaps, however, a clearer and a fuller exposition of Dominik's
thought will be found in the author's forthcoming The Mythic Voice of
Statius: Power and Politics in the Thebaid, to which many
cross-references are made in footnotes. I look forward to it.

Unfortunately, the present book is absolutely riddled with errors, some
venial, others of such a kind as to raise the eyebrows and even to
undermine confidence in the author's professional competence. To begin
with, the proportion of typographical foul-ups is higher than it should
be, and some of these errors are decidedly unsettling. It is, for example,
easy to forgive such a typo as Tartar for Tartara in the
quotation from Thebaid 8. 58 on p. 194; but why is it made again on
p. 246? And if that sounds picky, we have furibundae for
furibunde in the quotation from Thebaid 3. 272 on p. 82 --
and again on p. 253. Meanwhile, Lucan's Thessalian witch Erictho acquires
an extra aspirant on p. 114 -- and again on p. 124. When the discussion
turns to Parthenopaeus, the virginal goddess Diana is credited with
motherhood at the expense of Atalanta on p. 189. The same miracle occurs
in reverse on pp. 99 f., where, between the title and the second sentence,
'Argolic mothers' metamorphize into 'maidens', having been briefly
'matrons.' The habit of repeating errors is given a twist on p. 180, where
the first two sentences of the second paragraph of the section on taunts
are practically identical. The river Ismenos is confused with Oedipus'
daughter Ismene on p. 167, but then again, Crenaeus' mother is also called
both Ismenis (rightly) and Ismene in the space of a few lines (p.
130). Ancient authors, because of false etymologizing, sometimes wrote
querella for
querela (LHS i. 312): Dominik gives the impression of wanting to
subscribe to both orthographies at Thebaid 8. 57 (pp. 246 and 247),
siding now with Hill, and now with the Teubner of Klotz and Klinnert (and
Mozley's Loeb). Lastly, it is very disconcerting to see the first two
syllables of hominum scanned as a spondee on p. 263, especially
since metre is given such short shrift in any case in the discussion of
'elements of style.' If it is not ignorance that is to blame, then what we
have here is quite simply the worst example of sloppy copy-editing I for
one have ever come across in a book that purports to have seen the light
of day in a respectable academic publishing house.

As if all that
were not distraction enough, Dominik's English style is, to say the least,
somewhat unusual. Solecisms abound (a particularly common one is the
attribution of singular verbs to plural subjects), but far more striking
is the author's extraordinary diction. For example, I am simply not
capable of summoning up the proper frisson of dread at the 'direful
commingling' of Polynices' and Eteocles' remains (p. 125; cf. p. 242
'direful events'). The adolescent in me also greatly enjoyed seeing
examples of the epikedion referred to as 'lamentable speeches' on
p. 120, though the adult winced when the phrase cropped up again four
pages later. So too did the Statius enthusiast: one has to put up with
enough in the way of puerile witticisms from detractors of Statius in
this walk of life without having to endure this kind of 'friendly fire'
from those who are supposed to be on our side. Dominik's foremost
stylistic quirk, however, is the unrestrained use of Latinate adjectives
of doubtful pedigree. Adrastus' speeches are 'mediative' (p. 43), and Ide
makes a 'declarative statement' (p. 125). When Parthenopaeus talks about
the hair he vowed to Diana, Dominik talks about 'pileous references' (p.
118). A 'lachrymatory Polynices' is obliged to compete on p. 134 for the
linguistic centre stage, but is roundly beaten by Oedipus, what with his
'hair indurate with blood' and his 'traces of ocular effosion.' Also on
offer are a 'mitigative section' and a 'condolent spirit' (p. 139), as
well as a 'contaminative character' (p. 160), a 'sanguineous conflict' (p.
165) and 'imperatival' deliberations (p. 190). The reader perhaps by now
'refects exclamatively' (p. 174) on the boundless vitality of the English
tongue, and also on the 'inutility' (p. 196 ) of attempting to suppress
such vigour. Indeed, perhaps this is what Dr Johnson would be like on
speed: one might admire his inventival fecundity, but it would still be
sanguineously direful. The point is that we all have more to read than we
can possibly cope with. It seems only fair to observe that this book
should have been a lot shorter, and a lot better written.